4 brilliant Google search Easter eggs every nerd will love

One of the more endearing things about Google is that its engineers have wonderfully nerdy senses of humor that they like to embed into Google’s core search offering. CNET has put together a big list of 27 awesome Google Easter eggs that you should really check out. Of these, we’ve selected four particularly great Easter eggs that reference classic sci-fi movies, video games and even mathematical concepts that every nerd on the planet will absolutely love.

YouTube sci-fi trickery

If you type “beam me up Scotty” into YouTube, it will warp in your search results as if they’re being teleported to or from Star Trek’s USS Enterprise.

Similarly, typing “use the force Luke” will make your search results float around the screen just as Luke could make objects float around in Star Wars.

Classic video games right in your browser

Googling “zerg rush,” a reference to a classic tactic used by StarCraft players, will create a mini game in which the “o’s” in “Google” rebel and start viciously attacking your search results. As you can see in the video below, wiping out these renegade letters is trickier than it seems.

And that’s not all: Googling “Pacman Google” will give you an in-browser version of Pacman that you can play by clicking on the special Google Doodle.

For math and computer science nerds only

All of the Easter eggs mentioned so far are things that anyone with basic knowledge of nerd culture can understand. This last one, though, is tailored specifically toward math and computer science geeks.

If you Google “recursion,” Google will ask you if you meant to really search for… recursion. No, there isn’t a subtle spelling change there that you’re missing. As Wikipedia explains, “recursion is the process of repeating items in a self-similar way,” which means that the only logical thing to do after Googling “recursion” would be to Google “recursion” again.